>So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated

And it get worse from there. This is funny as hell. Billg eating his own shit.

Could it be the reboot thing is legacy code from Windows 1.0? Wait, then Gates himself was at th wheel.

Microsoft needs Bill Gates back, the young, abrasive version of him that didn't tolerate bullshit, to call them out on what they're shipping these days.

Read it.

Stopped halfway through thinking "Damn, this Mike Beckerman is a piece of work. Doesn't understand English grammar let alone software development."

Looked him up...

>Michael Beckerman is an American lobbyist who is vice president at TikTok.

Not surprising at all.

Can someone in Microsoft confirm my suspicion that this thread is still going and nothing was fixed?

Interestingly, Gupta didn’t reply at all, despite being named on bill’s original email directly. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/anoop/ He was natural-user-interface director at the time

I still reboot my desktop daily lol. I was born anti-tab pro fresh start

I love the fact that 2 days after the ceo surfaced basic usability issues there was still no tangible action plan.

It’s insane how much runway a monopoly can buy you.

Anyway to know this is real?

The bit about updates not truly being critical if you’re behind a firewall doesn’t age too well lol

This is a good and bit surprising one. I have a hard time believing the CEO of Palantir has this many generational points I agree with, Zuck too, but I do.

https://www.techemails.com/p/mark-zuckerberg-peter-thiel-mil...

“Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.”

That does not sound like something Bill Gates would say…

> So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated

I often wonder how CEOs and executives fail to notice how obviously broken their products are. This e-mail thread is quite illuminating. Most "work" in there is figuring out who will be blamed for it and why it shouldn't be your team.

2023 post, recounting an incident from 2003.

My favorite bit about this is how none of the execs want to take ownership of the change, but instead trying to put someone else in the hot seat and/or start a Committee.

This feels like an email that should have been blasted to the entire company. Top-down, empower employees to think of a more unified experience. Then again, all of the external jokes about Microsoft indicate that every department is fighting for their lives against the others, so that kind of kumbaya togetherness was never going to happen.

Read the whole thing and all I saw was zero accountability, zero ownership and zero consequences.

That’s how great products die or become a nightmare. Every team keeps on passing the ball to other team and nothing gets fixed or done or improved.

The reason why Apple won is Steve Jobs cared about quality and was an asshole about it and the inertia from that after his death has not entirely decayed yet.

The people in that thread need a good Linus Torvalds style rant about their incompetence and several of them should just have been fired.

Just as an aside, that Amir Majidimehr taking part of the conversation is Amir of audiosciencereview.com fame :)

Even today Microsoft can't get their shit together on a decent user experience. Tried to use Azure since I needed to code sign a binary on Github. My two previous accounts setup on Azure errored out with obscure errors and there was no way to fix them. I had to create a new account just to sign up for Azure Artifact Signing (which is now waiting for Microsoft to approve - no updates in a week). I don't know how anyone figures any of this out without reading pages of documentation. I honestly believe that no one actually cares about their products or user experience at Microsoft.

I will give Bill this, he does know how to play a typical user. Yeah, MS has some shenanigans (putting it mildly) in its birth and climb, but it was obvious from that that he was a relatively competent nerd, programmer etc., and that he was trying to paint the thought process of someone trying to put together family videos not "hurr, where this go, what this do?" like a Neanderthal.

Amusing watching all the executives try to push responsibility on each other and stay out the spotlist or, if unavoidable, take ownership of the smallest possible part of the problem, and then convene committees (that largely caused the mess) to solve the mess.

Big-corporate dysfunction is one of the reasons I like working in early startups.

(Startups that act like startups. Which means neither mimicking nor tolerating big-corporate style dysfunction. Otherwise, you have the worst of both worlds: soul-sucking big-corporate culture and difficulty executing, without the big-corporate paycheck and sometimes resume prestige boost.)

I think this is an example of "shipping your org chart". The fix is proposed in the reply "we need one person/team to own the overall picture", but I am not sure they reached that fix by the end of the thread.

This happens when you have people at the top of the chain who don't use the product and people at the bottom who are afraid to speak up, or use it so much they can't see the problems.

They think it's 'some issues' :) :) :)

It's a fundamental, cultural and systemic lack of concern for those issues.

An 'afterthought' that should be 'integral'.

That Gates did not realize that means it's 100% on him.

1000% actually.

He was struggling with the language of design and usability in 2003, no realizing even the implications of what he was seeing.

Like a cars coming out of the factory with missing parts ... blame it on the guy on the line?

No. Something is deeply wrong.

I really like Gates - but it's beyond shocking how these cultures work and how myopic they are.

I worked for a Fortune 50 - and it's pretty amazing to watch how an army of people with 'one eye' can be so competent in on way and blind in others.

I don't like to put Jobs on a pedestal but obviously this is something he understood (even then with gaping holes).

This thread should be on the first page of every book on microservices.

I feel, many times, the way Bill did in that email. Seems most people don’t mind or care.

I wondered how anyone successfully filed for unemployment a few years ago when I had to. But many seem to do it successfully.

I tell my wife that I pay too much attention to the details and have a low tolerance for poor work. I wish I didn’t notice though as it seems like a nice life!